Ron Paul Takes the Red Pill

Check from 4:50, where he pushes the "you are livestock" meme from one of Stefan Molyneux's most popular videos.

Paul then calls for people to join in Opt-Out Day at airports around America on 24 November. Opt-Out Day is a project of George Donnelly--a voluntaryist activist who has commented on Distributed Republic in the past.

The speech struck me as another milestone that has been passed. Not only are the ideas of academic anarchists (like Rothbard) influencing events, but today's breed of libertarian anarchists are shaping the future.

You might be right, but I think it's a stretch too far. When I first watched the speech, the "cattle" formulation did jump out at me as strange. Not because it was a livestock analogy, but because the more common livestock analogy among libertarians is "sheep". For a recent example see Judge Andrew Napolitano's book Nation of Sheep. It seems more likely that Ron Paul just modified a more popular libertarian livestock meme extant long before Molyneux offered his very clever red pill.

For curiousity's sake, I'll note that Mencius Moldbug offers his royalist solution to the modern democratic welfare state (you might call it the most efficient free-range farm possible) as a red pill too. The similarity being that they each reject a near-universally held political principle: in Molyneux's case statism, in Moldbug's democracy.